Content Management Matters ™

It’s that time of the year again. It’s time to shop for those shiny and new 2009 Lamborghini models, as well as for the new 2009 Web CMS report from CMS Watch.

The Lamborghini of Web CMS researchers, CMS Watch works diligently every year interviewing customers, vendors, partners and all sorts of other people on the CMS street to get the skinny on the Web CMS ecosphere and to give selected vendors an A or a D, depending on how well they did during 2008.

Brace yourselves and read on…

Ping Identity, a provider of identity management web services, has recently released PingFederate 5.2 -- a single sign-on software for SaaS users and vendors.

The new release incorporates key technologies from Ping Identity’s recent acquisition of Sxip Access to offer automated provisioning and de-provisioning, as well as advanced user access methods.

Ingeniux, an enterprise 2.0 WCM provider, has recently started offering three new SaaS packages for Ingeniux OnDemand, its hosted web content management solution.

The new approach is called "web content management by the slice" (hungry yet?) and allows customers to buy exactly as much of the Ingeniux CMS software as they need -- without the headaches of hardware and bandwidth -- all in a hosted environment.

DocuLex announced the release of its Archive Studio software as a service (SaaS), a web-based content management product providing remote document access, permissions, printing and distribution. The service enables secure document warehousing and sharing for practical knowledge management and collaboration.

Australian company, Australian Online Solutions, has a unique application sitting out on the web today. It's called TrustSaaS and it is a Software as a Service Application uptime monitoring, alerting and reporting solution. How's your SaaS app doing today?

Are you running an open source WCM website that needs a little social interactivity? You can get with it KickApps. The SaaS social media solutions provider has been working hard to provide their services to open source content management solutions like Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. You can learn all about it at the Linux World Expo in San Francisco next week.

SaaS Web Content Management Provider Clickability is picking up some nice accolades itself lately and according to CEO John Girard, these honors are a testament to Clickability's growth with high profile companies in a number of industries. And that's not all they have to talk about these days.

This SharePoint as a service thing has been in the works. Previously we had a chance to talk with Tom Rizzo, Redmond’s Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, just after the official announcement at the SharePoint Conference 2008 about the why fores and the hows.

Now we've got the scoop on pricing, including how Microsoft's partners are getting compensated for potentially loosing integration business. The short story is that Redmond is walking through the doors of change, but doing its best to keep the channel in the loop and incented to generate business.

So maybe it's not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google's Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia's education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

The field of virtualization just keeps a-movin'. This time, desktop/server virtualization heavy-weight Parallels is taking server virtualization into the up-and-coming realm of SaaS. Their popular OS virtualization solution, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, has been chosen by ProServe, one of the leading ISPs in the Netherlands, to deliver a scalable, cost-efficient Online Backup solution through a SaaS model.

CrownPeak, a Gold sponsor of the Gilbane Conference that starts tomorrow in San Francisco, has announced some major new features for its web content management system that should make both developers and end-users as excited as a school boy in a comic shop.

This new set of features includes support for Microsoft developers, better file management and improved web analytics with the flavor of Web 2.0.

Google has launched a new Website Optimizer Technology Partner (WOTEP) program to go along with its Website Optimizer Tool. The Website Optimizer is designed to help organizations increase traffic and turn more visitors into customers. Web Content Management provider Clickability has decided to take advantage of this new technology and is now a partner in the program.

SpringCM, on-demand document management and workflow extraordinaire, has announced SpringCM Version 4.3, the latest version of their SaaS document management and workflow platform. It features numerous new features and enhancements meant to improve business performance and to help automate document-centric processes like contract and proposal management, accounts payable and professional services engagement management.

There's a new game in town for online productivity applications. It hails from Adobe and if you like the look and feel of flash, you will like this suite of applications. The suite is called Acrobat.com and contains three applications that are required for almost all business needs. But does it compare to Zoho or Google Docs? We played around a little to see.

CrownPeak has a little more money in their pocket these days. They have just secured US$ 6m in funding from a second round of venture capital financing bringing the total raised to US$ 10.25m. What are they going to do with all the cash?

The second round brought out a new firm, SunAmerica Ventures, to sit alongside their existing investors - Sigma Partners and Altos Ventures. Troy Fukumoto from SunAmerica will join the CrownPeak board which already has a member from each of the other major investment companies.

So what exactly is a web content management vendor who provides their software as a service going to do with all that money? Well, CrownPeak isn't being explicit about the details, only saying it will be used to accelerate new product development initiatives and spend more money on marketing. It's all about "customer value" they say.

In February, CrownPeak came out with their content management SaaS offering. In January they announced integrated support for Google's Open Social. So maybe we'll be seeing more of a foray into social computing capabilities in their software, especially in the SaaS version of their software.